


Six Seconds

by Jadedphase



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Modern AU, jonty, mention of drug use, mild m/m
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 05:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1766491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jadedphase/pseuds/Jadedphase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monty is certain that he can make six seconds into something important, even if Jasper doesn’t believe it, yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six Seconds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Request by wholedamntime for some Jonty-themed AU to the idea of; ‘a fic where Monty finds out about Vines but can’t convince Jasper anything important can happen in 6 seconds’.

The steady tap, tap, tap of the laptop keyboard kept up a beat that was mirrored in the bounce of Jasper’s bare heel, a restless and subconscious motion of skin against the faintly tangled, still unmade corner of his bed.

Over the course of the twenty or so minutes that Monty had been busy typing away with apparent fixation while he sat at Jasper’s cluttered desk, shoved in the opposite corner of the room, the television situated on the dresser nearby had flashed the starting screen for the video game being listlessly played a total of four times.

Not that Jasper had been keeping count, he was paying the game about as much attention as he was the subtle squeak of springs that sounded with every twitch of his foot; it was all just background noise to what he considered to be a droningly dull summer afternoon.

Tired of the game after a few moments longer, or else tired of losing at it more likely the case, he tossed the controller aside and felt around on the bed for the remote to switch to the cable stations instead, pressing buttons in the vague search for something to draw his mind away from the stuffy heat that had leeched into the room and left his skin itchy and too warm.

"That show you like is on," he remarked when the familiar image settled on the screen and the host of said show stood half cast in shadow while he talked about haunted houses and toyed with devices adorned with flashing lights and meters. It wasn’t something that interested him all that much but for whatever reason Monty enjoyed watching the group of ghost hunters tirelessly repeat over and over each episode the paces of going somewhere haunted and trying to prove otherwise.

To Jasper it took some of the fun out of life to know all the answers, and he figured that if dead people wanted to hang around and bother the living it wasn’t really his problem so long as they weren’t haunting him.

But where he expected some sort of acknowledgment he only received a disjointed sound from Monty, even when his gaze drifted over to where his best friend was studying the screen of the laptop so intently.

Casting his eyes upward instead to stare at the slow spin of the ceiling fan almost made Jasper dizzy or sleepy, he couldn’t decide which at the time, but mostly it just made him want to curse the decision to move from upstairs down into the basement at the urging of his parents and their insistence that it would be cooler there in the summer and warmer in the winter.

At the time it had seemed ideal, given his dislike of the summer heat and Monty’s intolerance of the chilly winter air, but after a couple of months Monty had pointed out that it was probably more that Jasper’s parents wanted some peace and quiet when they’d made the suggestion.

Maybe that was true; they hadn’t been all that thrilled with his announcement that he and Monty had decided they would become famous by starting a band, nor were they too eager to suffer through the trials of their son’s ever-changing and lately rather loud taste in music.

But that was as typical of parents as Jasper’s wavering and straying ideas were of any seventeen year old.

To be fair he really had thought the band idea would work out, enough that a combined savings effort between the two of them had ended in a pawn shop set of an amp and a guitar that Monty had learned to play pretty well; and that had to count for something. The problem had been that Jasper might have thought a little more highly of his own singing talents than the rest of the world did but a person couldn’t be good at everything, right?

It was probably just as well that he couldn’t sing and Monty didn’t like the idea of preforming in front of people; being rock-stars was harder than it looked if the biography shows were any real judge of the matter.

At least the amp made a useful, if not expensive, chair if need be; Jasper tried to look at it as just another note on the long list of random whims the two of them stumbled through. It kept life interesting and he thrived on those sort of new possibilities as much as Monty did; even if the latter of the two wasn’t as vocal about his eagerness at times.

There was something about that afternoon though, the heat sinking in through the floors above them or the dull repeat on the television, or maybe it was just that Monty was ignoring him; whatever the reason might have been it was driving Jasper into fits of twitching discontent.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking my email," Monty replied after a pause and a few more taps of the keys, "and looking at a link Raven sent me."

Waiting for an explanation that didn’t come made Jasper twitch even more, until he finally hauled up some from his sprawl on the bed into sitting and watching Monty rather than continue his staring contest with the fan.

"Raven, huh? Since it was her I’m guessing it’s not porn, even if I would have thought that otherwise with how long you’ve been sitting there staring at the screen," Jasper snorted in an amused tone and collapsed back onto his bed with all the grace of an umbrella unfolding.

He was still getting to know Raven, Monty had more classes with her at the high school they attended and he had been introduced to her because of that, but during the few times he had talked to her the conversations had been entertaining. She had that sort of sharp wit that Jasper could appreciate and she was all in all a nice girl, one of the few that ever seemed to bother to talk to himself or Monty at all.

Now if it had been Bellamy emailing Monty instead then Jasper would have argued the porn idea as far more likely, assuming he could have gotten over the initial shock that Bellamy might have made an effort to say much to either of them beyond the Senior’s usual threats of death directed towards Jasper whenever he so much as glanced at his sister.

The thoughts rattling around inside his skull were interrupted, rudely, by the bounce of foil and plastic off the side of his head before he could delve too far into his usual lamenting over the state of social obscurity he existed in; the chip bag that ended up in his lap launched by Monty in response to the teasing.

"Why would I need your computer for that anyway when I’ve got my own," Monty pointed out as he watched Jasper retrieve the half empty bag he had thrown and shove his hand inside to liberate a few of the stale chips and toss them into his mouth.

"Don’t act like you’ve never used my laptop for that," Jasper countered between the crunch of chewing and laughing.

"It doesn’t count if you were watching too."

"Does it count as watching too if I was high?" Jasper thought it a valid distinction but Monty shook his head so he left it at that, it was too warm in the little room to argue anyway and if they actually sat down and tried to reason out what counted and what didn’t count when one or the other was in some inebriated state it could have taken all afternoon.

Monty opted to offer a peaceful compromise rather than debate; “Want to see?”

And since he felt like five more minutes of laying on the bed doing nothing was going to make his skin crawl off and drive his brain to the point of insanity Jasper stood and stretched his coltish legs before making his way the short distance across the room.

Leaning in closer to the screen as he studied the images on it, his brow furrowed as he lifted another handful of chips to his mouth; “What’s a vine? Is this one of your parents’ weird plant things?”

Not that he meant it badly, Monty’s parents worked for the same company as his own but not in the same department; while his parents built and researched Monty’s bred hybrid plants and tried to create new outlets of organic medicines.

The one resounding positive to Monty’s parents however, aside from the obvious of their home, and by proxy Monty’s room, having central air during those sweltering summer days, was their relaxed outlook on some of their son’s habits.

The first time Jasper had ever smoked pot with him he had been shocked when Monty had told him that his mom had grown it and even more surprised when he’d insisted that she was okay with them using it so long as they didn’t overdo it.

Too bad his own parents didn’t share the same outlook, if they were aware of how many nights their son spent in a haze they might not have thought Monty was the wonderful influence that they considered him to be.

"Can you maybe not talk and eat at the same time?" Monty groaned and gave him a light shove, brushing away some of the crumbs that had fallen on his shoulder when Jasper had leaned over him to look at the laptop. "And no, it’s a site where people put up six second videos they film with their phone."

"Six seconds?"

Curiosity sparked, as it was often prone to flaring up, Jasper pulled the amp over to the desk and sat down on it, briefly holding the bag of chips out to Monty and getting a dismissive shake of his head in response to the offer to share his snack.

"People can do a lot of important things in six seconds," Monty pointed out and was granted only a lifted eyebrow of doubt in return, "I’ll prove it if you hand me my phone."

It took a moment of rustling papers around enough to dig the phone out from where it was buried, Jasper wasn’t the tidiest person at times and it often required Monty’s complaining about the mess to get him to put forth any effort to clean it up, but finally they located the device and Monty set right to the task of uploading the program onto it while Jasper watched.

When he tipped the bag up to shake the last few chips into his mouth the distinct click of the phone caused him to blink and lower the plastic slowly, his brain not putting two and two together right away. Monty snickered and held the phone up to demonstrate the short video and there was the filmed version of Jasper on the screen; wrinkled t-shirt hanging limp on his shoulders from the heat and head tipped back with that bag raised high.

"Oh yeah, that’s attractive," Jasper drawled as he crumpled up the empty bag and tossed it towards the trashcan next to the desk. "I wasn’t ready."

"That was the point," Monty countered with a smirk hanging at the corner of his lips before he erased the video and held the phone up once more, "ready now?"

"What am I supposed to be doing?"

Again, the click of the phone, but that time around Monty ducked into the frame of it before the time ran out; the end result was only barely better than the first since Jasper had sat there with a puzzled expression.

"You didn’t even smile."

The fact that Monty’s tone bordered disappointed caused Jasper to feel a twinge of guilt for not realizing he was supposed to.

"Is six seconds even long enough to smile?"

Monty had no doubt that it was but opted for some teasing for good measure; “I don’t know, for most people it is, but maybe not the way you smile.”

Because when Jasper smiled it was an all out grin, bright and bold and just the sort of thing that people couldn’t help but feel good in the presence of; Monty was possibly the least immune of anyone to that infectious expression.

It was one of at least a dozen reasons that he thought his friend was easily one of the most outstanding people he knew; Jasper at his best was wonderful and at his worst was endearing in his complaints and stubborn nature.

"Okay, my turn," Jasper proclaimed as he took the phone from Monty and held it up above the both of them, mashing the button and giving the other teen a nudge to do something entertaining.

Ten minutes later, a fair amount of humored banter, along with the occasional burst of laughter, and a few videos still hadn’t convince Jasper of anything more than a few simple facts; Monty had some supernatural ability to look perfectly groomed and in order even in the miserable heat while he was a mess of mussed hair and sleepy disarray, and there was really nothing all that redeeming or worthwhile that could fit in the span of six seconds.

It was something to pass the time, yes, but he was certain he’d proven Monty wrong.

"It’s an experience thing, you know; capturing a moment." Monty insisted as he motioned for Jasper to reset the timer on the camera again.

With Monty everything was an experience, sometimes Jasper couldn’t help but wonder if his friend didn’t use anything as a chance to study the world just to figure out how it all fit together. But he couldn’t forsake him that either since it was likely the reason Monty was so brilliant in those unconventional ways he admired.

"Okay, one more," Jasper finally relented.

It was too hard to refuse when Monty was so determined about an idea, which did get the two of them into as much trouble as Jasper’s tendency towards distraction; but was there really any point in keeping count over things like that?

His finger grazed the screen once more and Monty popped into the frame, the furrow to his brow a determined one, and promptly leaned in closer.

And Jasper found himself blinking over a set of warm lips suddenly resting against his own when he turned his head towards the oddly energetic version of Monty that had invaded the small span of space between the two of them.

It wasn’t that Monty had never kissed him before, or that he had never kissed Monty, because it happened now and then in the midst of a really good buzz when everything was foggy and the occasional roaming hand slid over clothes or the brush of lips was brief and mostly for the sake of wanting a little contact to ground the moment.

It was that Monty had never kissed him like he was right that moment; six seconds seemed to last hours and it wasn’t simply a nudge so much as it was a tentative lingering of soft sensation.

Lips that were not as chapped by the heat as his own, nor did the brush of the other’s chin hold the faint scratch that Jasper knew his own must have, and for whatever reason during those few long seconds he came to the conclusion that he could taste coffee in that kiss.

That had to be Monty, since Jasper couldn’t stand the way his mind raced too much when he drank the stuff, and made it all the more appealing in a way that Jasper couldn’t quite sort out as to why he liked it; only that he did.

It was an actual, sober, surprising and real kiss; the type that Jasper didn’t have much personal experience with and had always expected to come from just about anyone but his best friend.

They both lost sense of the time or when the phone clicked again but it was still Monty who drew back first, looking rather pleased with himself over the mix of confusion and more unsorted emotions written across Jasper’s face.

"See, you can do a lot with six seconds."

The way Monty said it, with humor and a subtle reassurance to the words that made it all okay and normal in the way that only made sense between the two of them, was enough for Jasper to take it as it was rather than hang on the the oddity of the moment.

It wasn’t a joke exactly, he could tell, but Monty was willing to let it be if Jasper needed it to.

The real question was if he did need that or if he was okay with that new and subtle little shift between them, something that felt as though it had settled into place before Jasper really even bothered to question too much the absence of what he hadn’t known might have been missing before.

"Okay, maybe you’re right this time," he admitted with a tiny smile accented by a restless scrub at his palm with fingertips that just couldn’t manage to stay still and a curiosity that was begging to be addressed.

"So what’re you going to show me if I give you six minutes?"


End file.
